Anyone a hunter?

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I am curious if there are any WP members who hunt?

If there are any hunters here, I am curious to know about how you experience this?

Do you dress and butcher your game?
Do you find it painful or distressing to take life?
If you have experience in both hunting and fishing, is there a significant difference between killing a mammal and killing a fish in your experience?
Is it different to consume meat that you have hunted and butchered rather than purchased in a plastic wrapped foam tray at a supermarket?

My Dad used to take me hunting and fishing when I was a kid but I never really liked it - so, as an adult I don't pursue either.

Was this hunting with a rifle?
Was there anything about these experiences with your dad that you enjoyed?
Was there anything about these experiences that you found particularly unpleasant?

You ask really interesting questions. I hope you get more answers. Maybe Dillogic and some other hunters will answer.

I caught a pair of mackeral once. They were quite tasty. Hired a rowing boat for fun, and noticed there were a couple of hooks and lines attached to the stern, so gave it a go. Only felt slightly guilty. Since then I've become almost veganic and wouldn't do it again unless I was starving to death.

[moved from general autism discussion to random discussion]

my uncle took me hunting a few times last summer, the only one with guns in the whole family. i never was too sure what we were looking for those days, but we never saw much of anything outside of tarantulas and mosquitoes. for the most part we just walked around with guns, swatting insects.

once the flies were gone though, the silence could have been my favorite part, hearing the bloodflow in my ears.

i've only gone shooting since.

i once helped my uncle carry a freshly killed deer back to his truck two summers ago, he had forgotten to bring his wheelbarrow (or whatever it was he planned to use to transport the game) and me being lankier and frailer back then, was near fainting the whole time. never knew those things were so heavy, even half- gutted.

unlike with fish, i've never personally finished off a mammal so i can't tell, yet.



hardly/not really. for me any difference lies in the way it's presented. also, it's mostly venison which isn't exactly easy to come by in the deli in my experience...

I don't hunt but I don't have a problem with hunters. I don't much care for game though. I get a lot of it from people I know, living in the country in the middle of nowhere in the Deep South, I know a lot of hunters. And, to put myself in a Jeff Foxworthy joke, I also know a famous taxidermist. Really. Hank Williams Jr's taxidermist is right up the road from me.

Anyway, I like to target shoot. If I had to hunt to eat I would do it, no problem but I don't much care for game and it's illegal to go shoot somebody's cows or pigs in their yards, so the fact that there are no wild cows or pigs would just make me a vegetarian. Except for chicken. I've killed chickens before. Not for eating but for spells. I did not feel bad because chickens will f**k you up when you grab them.

I've fished, and it didn't bother me to kill them. I have put dogs and cats down when I worked at the vets office as a tech. That was sad always, but more likely because it was a pet even if it wasn't cute or cuddly at the time. It had been at some point.

My sons and husband have been hunting. Only my oldest son likes it. He's also a huge fisherman. I wish he would get a nice buck and mount it and let me have it for the den though. But so far he hasn't and I'm not putting a fish mount in my house, thats beyond tacky unless it's a marlin and there are no marlin in the river.

I did however, once interview Ted Nugent. Does that count?

It's something I'd like to get back into one of these days. I used to hunt squirrels for pest control on my grandparents' property, I've gone on small hunting trips with some friends and relatives, and I've also helped butcher moose and deer. It's a part of growing up in a rural area that not a lot of people get to experience nowadays, and there's just something indescribably nice about it. When you're out in the bush, it kind of harkens back to a time gone by, when wilderness reigned supreme, and humans were just another animal.

Now, I'm not claiming I have a lot of experience with hunting, because truth be told, there are plenty of people where I live who have spent much more time in the bush than I have, but in the bigger picture, most people have never had the chance to experience these things, so I am fortunate to have the amount of experience that I do.

I also believe that wild meat is not only tastier than the stuff you get in the store, but much healthier as well, since it isn't loaded with things like growth hormones and antibiotics. As much as I like my meat, I think people, as well as livestock, would have healthier lives if we banned factory farming and raised all of our livestock free-range. Meat would become more expensive, and there wouldn't be as much of it, but the overall quality of it would be better, so people could savour it more.

I hunt and fish. I hunt mainly with a rifle or shotgun, depending on the prey, though I am saving up for a good compound bow so I can hunt deer locally (regulations allow only bow hunting for deer near me). I don't feel bad for taking a life for three reasons: I only hunt for food, not exclusively sport, and I make every effort to make the animal expire as quickly and painlessly as I can by only taking shots in which I am confident I can inflict a fatal wound, and if I find the animal is still alive/suffering I euthanize it. I am not concerned with keeping "trophy heads", racks, or anything like that. Finally, hunting is highly regulated in my state and regulations are updated every year based on animal populations. We have strict limits on the more commonly hunted breeds, and higher limits on populations that are overrun. For example, I can take two deer or two turkeys, but since coyote are very overpopulated here, there are no limits and no specified season. While conservation efforts by hunting may not make sense to non-hunters, which is fine, I feel that well-regulated hunting is both humane and the responsible thing to do to ensure the survival of local populations of species.

I go with my brother a lot, and the only issue I have ever encountered was when we would hunt bullfrog with a gig. I normally use a .22 rifle, but some places only allow gigging. I find that to be a bit on the barbaric side. Frogs are incredibly resilient creatures and can survive severe trauma. Interestingly enough, my brother feels the same about a gig. His feeling is that a frog can take a bullet and escape to suffer on, while with a gig the frog will not escape and he can then euthanize it.

Thanks for the replies.

The most unexpected and delightful answer has to be OOM's:

What an great example of the diversity of thinking and ways of relating to things among us.

I put this in "general autism" because I was thinking about two things that I have seen posted about autism on WP:
1) the idea that all autistic people have some deep emotional connection with animals that will tend to make them vegetarian/vegan and generally aligned with the PETA idea.
2) the idea that autistic people are either Neanderthals or the next step in evolution and have sensory and cognitive characteristics that would make them.

But I also posted this because I am in the early stages of a new special interest: archery. I have been ignoring other things and devouring all information I can possibly get about archery. Naturally, bow hunting comes up as part of this, and I found myself thinking about how I might feel about it.

One of my cats was playing with a partially disemboweled baby rabbit the other day and the poor thing was screaming like a baby. I felt I had to put it out of it's misery and I took a sharp knife and cut it's spine. I felt I was doing it a favor in ending the pain and terror. Honestly, it didn't have much impact on me emotionally, very like catching a fish and I thought that I wouldn't have a problem hunting rabbits to eat, if I needed to. I thought I would be squeamish, because I find medical images disturbing, but it turns out that I am not, at least not in that context.

I would appreciate additional comments from anyone who has experience with hunting. Thanks for sharing your experiences!

I hunt pizzas. They're easier to catch and they taste a lot better.

But seriously, my dad really enjoys fishing and hunting and I think if he could he'd live like a rugged pioneer.
I have never been able to develop a taste for wild game, however. One time I came to my parents house to find they had just made several meat pies made with an assortment of pheasant, deer, and other game, and I said, "You know, sometimes I wish pizzas lived in the woods". I didn't have to eat any of it, though.

It was partridge hunting with a small rifle. Enjoyed the time with my Dad walking through the woods. Enjoy firing firearms. Didn't enjoy the whole killing the bird part.

That all makes sense. Thanks for the information.

Short answer would have to be: not yet. I'm fully licensed and and graduated, and I own one Weatherby Mk. V and a Beretta over/under shotgun. However, finding places to hunt is a bit tough, and many hunters rely on internal connections that I as a newbie don't have. Still on the hunt, as it were.

I do feel a strong empathy for the animals, and I haven't yet determined if I could take the life what one might term "charismatic megafauna". However, I've wrestled with the question a lot in my head, and basically concluded that it's arrogant to suggest that a living creature that I see is somehow worth more than all the ones I don't see. We have, for instance, a massive overpopulation of red fox, and with that comes the spread of ticks and mange, which spreads to other animals, such as roe deer. Hence, failing to cull foxes will have consequences for other animals.

Other than a certain primal appeal, it's also the most defensible form of meat-eating, both with regard to the climate and to ethics.




Quoted for truth

It's actually not too difficult an equation. Say a moose has two calves. During a bad winter, food may be scarce, and feeding two calves requires more food than feeding one. As a result, both calves may end up dying. Shooting one calf doubles the chances for one calf + mother to survive. I'm not trying to lecture you, just explaining a simple scenario that makes sense of how hunting can be beneficial to a population for non-hunters.

As an illustration:



This graph shows the number of taken moose since the 1970s up to 1989. The moose was almost extinct in sweden due to poorly regulated hunting, but a centralised effort by hunters and the government to make the hunt regulated and the instating of mandatory education for hunters has seen the population soar. Today, the moose-population is steady at around 300 000 heads, with an annual growth of about 50%, most of which is culled yearly to keep from overpopulating.

Yo,

-Of course
-nope
-no difference
-there's no ethical and moral difference between purchasing from someone and hunting

Thanks for the additional comments.

Wolfram87, the rational arguments you present about conservation are convincing to me. I have seen a local nature preserve devastated with an overpopulation of deer, then recover after a series of annual culls.

Unfortunately, the argument against this is entirely emotional and easily shakes off logic and rational thinking.